Author Information At the Circulating Library

Author: Mary Isabella Irwin Brotherton (1820–1910)

Alternate Name(s): Rees (maiden name)

Biography: Mary Isabella Irwin Brotherton was born in 1820 in Calcutta, India, the daughter of John Mitford Rees of the Bengal Civil Service and second judge of the provincial courts of appeal and circuit for Calcutta. Her father died shortly before she was born. Her mother, a young widow, moved to Devonshire with her four sons and daughter where they lived near the Tennyson family. In 1851, she married landscape painter Augustus Hervey Brotherton (died 1887) and the couple spent many years in Rome where they met Thackeray and the Brownings. In the 1880s, they moved to Freshwater, Hampshire. During her life, she wrote two collections of poems (1855, 1895), a memoir Old Acquaintance (1874), and two novels: Arthur Brandon (1856) and Respectable Sinners (1863). She died in 1910 in Freshwater.